IBM launches bare metal Kubernetes

Containers are quickly becoming the standard way for deploying new applications in the cloud and that’s even true for the most traditional of enterprises&period; It’s no surprise then that every major cloud provider is betting on containers — and more specifically on the open source Kubernetes container orchestration service&period; IBM has long offered its own take on this with its Cloud Container Service and today it’s offering an industry first&colon; bare metal Kubernetes as a managed service&period;

Why does that matter&quest; Running containers on bare metal has some performance benefits and development teams will be able to choose the kid of machine they want to run their containers on&period; But at the same time&comma; knowing that you are running your containers on a machine that you don’t share with other customers also adds another layer of security and isolation that you don’t get from running on a regular container service&period;

As IBM’s CTO for Watson and Cloud Bryson Koehler told me&comma; this now also opens up the ability to attach GPUs to these machines&comma; which in turn enables the kind of machine learning and high performance computing workloads that many enterprises are now starting to experiment with&period; “If you look at the types of workloads that enterprises are moving to the cloud&comma; bare metal is a huge benefactor in terms of isolation and flexibility&comma;” Koehler told me&period;

Like the rest of the IBM Cloud Container Service&comma; this is a fully managed services with the kind of automatic updates and security patches that come with that&period;